1. Which of the following is most strongly suggested by the government’s statement above?
(A) A warning that applies to a small population is inappropriate.
(B) Very few people drink as many as six cups of coffee a day.
(C) There are doubts about the conclusive nature of studies on animals.
(D) Studies on rats provide little data about human birth defects.
(E) The seriousness of birth defects involving caffeine is not clear.
Given the structure of this question I assumed there'd be more than one right answer but apparently, the only "logical" answer is C.
Maybe the word logic is used differently in the legal profession, but this doesn't resemble the kind of logic test I'm used to. It's about unstated/assumed implications of natural language statements i.e. what a 'reasonable' person might read into something, rather than some sort of tight reasoning on which logical laws could be applied. I can see why that's relevant for lawyers but it's not really about logic.
Still, let's roll with it. (A) and (B) are clearly irrelevant given the stated justification, strike those. But (C) and (D) appear to just be minor re-phrasings of each other. Why is C correct but D not? An implied assumption of the study is that rat studies provide a lot of data about human birth defects, and the government's position implies that they don't agree with that. D could easily be a reasonable subtext for that position. E could also be taken as a reasonable inference, that is, the government believes there's a risk the study authors are using an exaggerated definition of birth defect that voters wouldn't agree with, and that 'refutation' of the study would take the form of pointing out the definitional mismatch.
So if I was asked to score this question I'd accept C, D or E. The LSAT authors apparently wouldn't.
That said, the "analytical reasoning" sample question looks more like a logic test, and the logic test looks more like a test of analytical reasoning. But even their bus question is kind of bizarre. It's not really a logical reasoning test. It's more like a test to see if you can ignore irrelevant information. The moment they say rider C always takes bus 3, and then ask which bus {any combination + C} can take, the answer must be (C) 3 only. Which is the correct answer.
> I do not think that it really matters which questions you choose as long as they span a wide enough difficulty range so that you are able to separate participants.
The problems here are pointing at a fundamental difficulty: all claims about competence/expertise are relative to the person picking the definition of competent. In this case the tasks are all variants on "guess what the prof thinks the right answer is", which is certainly the definition of competence used in universities, but people outside academia often have rather different definitions.
So the questions really do matter. If the DK claim was more tightly scoped to their evidence - "people who think they're really good at guessing what DK believe actually aren't" - then nobody would care about their results at all. Because they generalized undergrads guessing what jokes Dunning & Kruger think are funny to every possible field of competence across the entire human race, they became famous.
